News

Garden Party Things that go bumpkin in the night: As a native of LaSalle, another dusty little town on the way from Denver to Greeley, I appreciated Robin Chotzinoff’s “The Plot Thickens,” her February 8 article on Garden City and its infamous history. During my adolescent years in the area,…

In the late 1800s, what is now lower downtown was the heart and groin of Denver, a rowdy, rollicking locus that served as a jumping-off point for folks hell-bent on gold and riches. The neighborhood teemed with saloons, gambling halls and bawdy houses, and it seemed that cardsharps, ladies of…

Ali Pahlavi certainly isn’t the first hustler to find his way to Denver. He isn’t even the first person to pose as a member of one royal family or another, although in this sports-crazy town, cops are more familiar with men who pretend they’re a member of the Denver Broncos…

The smell of feedlot hung in the air as I drove up Route 85 from Brighton, and a sign reading “Welcome to Garden City” flashed by. Whatever sort of place Garden City was, I drove through it in less than a minute and right on into the heart of Greeley…

For weeks now, Mike Cerbo has been Mayor Wellington Webb’s worst nightmare. Cerbo, the secretary-treasurer of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 14, has campaigned relentlessly against Denver’s $64 million subsidy of a Hyatt hotel planned for a parking lot across 14th Street from the Colorado Convention Center. The $217…

Peter Reshetniak respects wildlife. Dale Todd respects life. Neither man feels he is getting much respect from the state legislature, however, since lawmakers are well on their way to approving a bill that would not only make it harder for groups to qualify for specialty license plates but could also…

Every February, Rocky Mountain Wa Shonaji invites a well-known quilter to give a lecture in Denver. This year, the group (whose name means “people who sew” in Swahili) selected Raymond Dobard, a respected quilter and art-history professor from Howard University in Washington, D.C. Two years ago, Dobard, who gave his…

Oh, the heartbreak! For all these years, we thought we’d been buying Girl Scout cookies in support of the organization’s efforts to build character in young girls and help them do good deeds (and because we have no self-control when it comes to Tagalongs). But as it turns out, our…

Linda Chavez lost her chance to serve as George W. Bush’s Labor Secretary when the news broke that she’d once sheltered an illegal alien. But, since she dropped out of the running for the position on January 9, the onetime Denver resident has been cashing in — or trying to,…

Sheep Thrills Like lambs to the slaughter: I can’t tell you how much my circle of friends and I enjoyed Stuart Steers’s “Meaner Pastures,” in the February 1 issue. I have never met the Peroulis family, I know nothing about them, and I don’t hear anybody defending them in Moffat…

Last May, a sick and injured Peruvian sheepherder showed up on the doorstep of a rancher near Meeker. The herder, Remigio Inga Damian, had spent several days walking from the remote backcountry pasture where he’d been tending a herd of 1,000 sheep. Exhausted and feverish, he’d hidden in an abandoned…

The Black American West Museum and Heritage Center won’t be open during Black History Month. The venerable institution has been forced to close its doors for all of February, and possibly longer, because it doesn’t have enough money to continue operating. “That’s very, very unfortunate,” says museum boardmember Ottawa Harris…

Twelve weeks into the school year, Joy Kay got the surprise of her teaching career. A parent who had come to her biology classroom at Thomas Jefferson High School to pick up her child’s progress report wondered why her kid had gotten a B at the six-week grading period and…

For once, the City of Denver and local Freedom From Religion Foundation activist/attorney Bob Tiernan are on the same page — if not the same chapter and verse. Tiernan, who has battled the city and other government agencies over separation of church and state matters, won his recent fight to…

Not too long ago, a customer walked into Martín Ramirez’s botánica complaining that he couldn’t have sex. And he’d tried, the man explained. A lot. So Martín asked him for a personal object, and the man handed over a watch. Martín rubbed the trinket in his hands, closed his eyes…

At first glance, the Denver Post’s January 14 introduction of columnist Tina Griego seemed benign — but wrapped inside it was a needle aimed straight at the Rocky Mountain News, the Post’s joint-operating-agreement buddy. Specifically, the item announced that Griego’s work will appear on the editorial page in Saturday papers…

Don’t Be an Ash! History in the making: Please consider that the diminishing support for your editorial views is because you are out of touch with the common, decent people of America. Change or wind up on the ash heap of history. Howard Eckles Denver Food for Thought Soul on…

The stage lights brighten, illuminating two irregular groupings of styrofoam blocks arranged like rock formations on a beach. A stagehand adds the sound of waves breaking on the shore, and then…nothing. “Uh, when the lights come up, that means the play is supposed to start,” shouts director Jimy Murphy from…

Janice and Jhenita Whitfield were crossing the Western Slope, en route from San Diego to Denver, when they were pulled over for Driving While Black. Jhenita had been living in California with her sister, an operations technician with the Navy, for seven months. Now, on this cold spring morning in…

There weren’t any trees at first. Maybe a few cottonwoods — scrappy, messy tangles along the banks of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River — but the rest was just sagebrush and tall grass. Then the gold miners came, and the bartenders, the merchants and the ranchers, the doctors…